With nothing to lose—and an absurdly heavy backpack—Cheryl Strayed embarked on a life-changing wilderness trek.

Can a baby person be a novelist?

Women are used to the bad behavior of men. But I had broken the rules. I was viewed by many as the worst kind of woman: the whore, the slut, the adulteress, the liar, the cheat. And to top it all off, I had wronged the best of men.

He was the kind of man that other men did not know well enough to be threatened by sexually.